The Beginning

In Indonesia, there is a thing called ‘ngidam’ where pregnant woman usually craves for something, usually food that is pretty hard to get. When it happens, the partner must satisfy the craving… or so the old saying goes.

That’s exactly what happened to us towards the end of last year. My wife suddenly craved for Balinese’s sambalmatah that is specially made by our auntie back in Indonesia. As it was almost impossible for us to go to Indonesia at that time, she decided to just make it from scratch.

Some of you probably know this: when you make chilli sauce, you don’t make a tiny jar of it. After working her magic in the kitchen, she made a bit too much. We then sent some of it to my work colleagues and her mates to try. We did not expect that the feedback we received were pretty encouraging. One of our chilli- loving friends said “Nice balance of flavours and the chilli not too overpowering even for the majority of tastes – it lingers a little but the sweetness combats it nicely..”

That’s when we had this crazy thought about making Sambal Bu Diah.

We started researching on how to make the taste consistent, tinkering about the heat levels, and also the incredibly tedious (We won’t bore you with the details) steps to ensure that the products adhere to the Australian standards in condiments manufacturing.

We decided that as a start, our product would have three different heat levels: Medium, Hot, and Indonesian. Considering that our sambal contains allergen seafood paste, we are also creating the vegetarian option for the Indonesian heat level.